A friend was dumping stuff prior to a move. I took all his electro gadgets just to prevent it becoming e-waste.
In the pile of stuff is an Amazon Alexa. Fuck #Amazon. I boycott Amazon and also have principled objections to their snooping, business practices, etc. My choices seem to be:
- trash the Alexa
- donate the Alexa to charity
These are both lousy choices. Donating it as-is would ultimately put it in someone’s house which then feeds Amazon.
Is there another option? I did a quick search and see no FOSS to replace whatever garbage Amazon has on it. It could be attached to the LAN with an egress firewall that blocks cloud access, but I suppose then it is useless, correct?
(update) I added a link to an article that shows what the thing looks like. The article is otherwise irrelevent.
New extra requirement: the user must be able to say “Oh, yeah, no, for sure” without the thing exploding into flames.
If it has good speaker in it, in the worst case you can just cut/throw away all the “smart” electronics out of it and place something like a RPi + an amplifier inside to have a mini media center.
How difficult would this be to do?
Depends on which setup you’d like to go for.
Disassembly aside (no idea how Alexa looks like on the inside), you could go for something simplest: take a RPi 1B/2/3/4, plug in the 3.5mm jack into it and solder the other side directly to the speaker. This, in theory, should work out of the box and give you some decent sound (and probably even okayish volume).
If you want to go more elaborate, you might use some smaller/cheaper computer (e.g. RPi Zero 2W) + some tiny external DAC+amplifier. In this case you will have to ensure that the DAC is compatible with your computer, that the software is there and also handle power supply to both of them, and possibly also take care of the 50/60 Hz hum induced by it (depends on the power supply, the DAC and its wiring).
You could go even cheaper with something like this: https://arduinoyard.com/dfplayer-mini-with-esp32/
But here you start hitting a limitation that it won’t be a regular Linux machine anymore, but a microcontroller with its own set of capabilities and interfaces that you’d need to handle.
For example, in this configuration it would be able to play MP3 files from an SD card, but probably not the web streams (even direct ones) or something of that nature — for that you’d need a different setup, I guess.
I’ve done something similar - repurposing old 90’s boomboxes with hifiberry - it works relatively well (but does require some tinkering.